The blog

How the two are related: Pantene shampoo, 2012; Cycles Gladiator, 1895

Pantene, the shampoo brand, has started an advertising campaign using the flowing locks of champion cyclist Victoria Pendleton. However, she’s wearing a UCI-compliant sparkly go-faster jersey. Clothes? Who needs clothes? The flowing locks on the nude Cycles Gladiator woman from 1895 (click to biggify) show that the Belle Epoque in France was rather risqué.

Road.cc has a fine article on the thinking behind the shampoo poster, although the comments section is filling up with (obtuse?) comments over the choice of bike and gears.

The Cycles Gladiator poster was produced by printer G. Massias of Paris. Only four of the originals still exist today.

The French bicycle brand was started in 1891 by Alexandre Darracq (naturally, like other cycle pioneers, he later manufactured automobiles). The company was later bought by fraudster Harry Lawson. I’ve already mentioned his contributions to cycling and to motoring.

He created the famous Emanicipation Run of 1896, the drive from London to Brighton, now reenacted each year as one of the key events in British motoring history. But first he was a bicycle designer and bicycle company owner, the creator of the ‘Safety’ bicycle, the grand-daddy of today’s rear-driven low-mount bicycle with gears. The Rover Safety, designed by John Kemp Starley some six years later, is usually listed as the first modern bicycle – the rider was lower to the ground than on a highwheeler so was safer – but, in fact, he was beaten to it by Lawson. His ‘Bicyclette’ of 1879 was ahead of its time: it was thought undignified, too complex, and although popular for a time in his home town of Brighton, it failed to sell nationally. Undeterred, Lawson carried on designing bicycles through the 1880s. (The name for his bike later became one of the French words for bicycle).

But it’s as a financier – first of bicycle companies, later of motorcar companies – that Lawson was to achieve fame. Or, rather, infamy. His motorcar syndicates and company flotations were often based on fraudulent claims. Despite possessing a brand with perhaps the most iconic poster in cycling, Lawson came a cropper, Cycles Gladiator being one of the casualties. Booo!

"How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring." ROADS WERE NOT BUILT FOR CARS is a print, Kindle, iPad and free e-book about roads history.
The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.
'Roads Were Not Built for Cars' is a history book, focussing on a time when cyclists had political clout, in Britain and especially in America. The book researches the Roads Improvement Association - a lobbying group created by the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1886 - and the Good Roads movement organised by the League of American Wheelmen in the same period.

The book was published in a Kickstarter limited-edition in September 2014. Island Press of Washington, D.C. published a revised second-edition in April 2015.
Thanks to research grants and advertising support, text-only PDF chapters from the book are slowly being made available for free to read online. The free distribution model is being used in order to get the book seen by as many eyes as possible. The paid-for publications are richly illustrated; the free versions have had the pix stripped out and replaced with adverts.
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